Monday, February 29, 2016

The Availability and Utility of Services to Address Risk Factors for Recidivism among Justice-Involved Veterans

The availability and utility
of services to address recidivism risk factors among justice-involved veterans
is unknown. We explored these issues through qualitative interviews with 63
Specialists from the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) Veterans Justice
Programs. To guide the interviews, we utilized the Risk-Need-Responsivity (RNR)
model of offender rehabilitation. Specialists reported that justice-involved
veterans generally have access to services to address most RNR-based risk
factors (substance abuse; lack of positive school/work involvement;
family/marital dysfunction; lack of prosocial activities/interests), but have
less access to services targeting risk factors of antisocial tendencies and
associates and empirically-based treatments for recidivism in VA. Peer-based
services, motivational interviewing/cognitive-behavioral therapy, and Veterans
Treatment Courts were perceived as useful to address multiple risk factors.

These findings highlight potential gaps in provision of evidence-based care to
address recidivism among justice-involved veterans, as well as promising
policy-based solutions that may have widespread impact on reducing recidivism
in this population.

...The objectives of the current study were to determine the
availability of services for justice-involved veterans that address
empirically-supported risk factors for recidivism that are targeted by the RNR
model, the types of treatment options and resources that are perceived as being
most helpful in addressing these risk factors, and whether justice-involved
veterans have access to empirically-based treatments for recidivism risk. For most risk factors
(substance abuse, lack of positive school or work involvement, family/marital
dysfunction, and lack of prosocial activities/interests), responses from the
majority of Veterans Justice Program Specialists in our sample included description of some type of
treatment option or resource that was available to address these issues among
justice-involved veterans. By comparison, only a little more than half of the
Specialists’ responses included description of any treatment options or
resources to address antisocial tendencies and antisocial associates. This is
noteworthy, given that risk factors related to antisociality (i.e., the Big
Four) have been identified as the strongest predictors of criminal recidivism (Andrews & Bonta, 2010a,2010b).

The current findings are largely consistent with
research on availability of services for offenders in general. For example, a
recent review highlighted the range of offender reentry programs and services
that target vocational training, substance abuse prevention, and other
psychosocial needs of offenders (e.g., housing; James, 2015). By contrast,
others have noted that extant programming for offenders tend not target
antisocial tendencies, despite the centrality of these issues in the prediction
of recidivism risk (Epperson et al., 2014;Wolff et al., 2013).
This potential gap may be greater among justice-involved veterans, given that
in the current study the availability of interventions that directly target
antisocial cognitions and attitudes (e.g., MRT, T4C) were reported to be less
prevalent in VA (vs. non-VA settings)...